


Secrets

by Raelynn



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/M, Mentions of past drug use, Molly is patient and understanding, STI, Sherlock has a secret, as always, safe sex, sherlock was a junkie and did junkie things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-11
Updated: 2015-01-11
Packaged: 2018-03-07 01:44:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3156308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Raelynn/pseuds/Raelynn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So I was reading a fic a couple weeks ago and Sherlock and Molly were about to do the do, and he's all "We don't need condoms, I'm clean" and I thought "You know, what if he wasn't?  Lots of people pick up STIs when they're not thinking too clearly and engaging in risky sex."</p>
<p>So I wrote this.  I don't expect it'll get a lot of attention because we don't like to think of our Sherlock as less than perfect, but I think it's a bit Real.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Secrets

“Goodnight Mike, I’m off for the weekend!” called Molly over her shoulder, sliding her bag up onto her shoulder and heading for the exit of Bart’s. She didn’t want to linger, lest Mike try to talk her into working an extra shift. She was ready for a relaxing weekend, perhaps some wine, and definitely a good book or two. Or three, now that she stopped to think about it.

She walked quickly to the tube station, enjoying the mild spring evening. Once the chaos around the “fake Moriarty” had settled down, she had settled into a pretty good routine with work and home. Sherlock’s occasional forays into her lab or her morgue were back to being regular, almost comforting. Sure, the detective drove her mad on a regular basis, and yes, part of her still fancied him, but all was well. 

Eventually, Molly let herself into her flat, hanging her stuff up just inside the door and laughing at an insistent Toby, who you’d think was starving by the way he wrapped himself around her legs and cried at her.

“Silly kitty. Give me a second!” Molly made her way into the kitchen, reaching into the cabinet for a tin of cat food. She spooned it out into a clean bowl and set it down. As Toby ate, she went into the bathroom and started drawing herself a bath, making it steaming hot. Leaving it to cool a bit, she rummaged around in the kitchen, throwing together some leftovers and pouring a glass of wine. Taking it all back into the bathroom, she set it on the table she kept next to the tub for just this purpose.

Stripping out of her clothes, Molly lowered herself into the tub, sighing happily as she did. A whole weekend off. What could be better?

oOo

She had finished her food and wine and was dozing lightly in the tub when her phone started buzzing. She ignored the first text, and the second, and the six after that, but eventually she sat up, leaned over and dried her hands on a towel, and picked up her phone.

“Molly, I require your presence at Baker Street. - SH”  
“Please. -SH”

It was the please that got her attention, and before she could even think about it, she was draining the tub and drying off. Ducking into her bedroom for clean clothes, she made her way out and caught a cab over to Sherlock’s flat. She rang the bell, and Mrs. Hudson let her in. 

She knocked twice on the door to Sherlock’s flat, and then pushed it open. “Sherlock?” she called, not seeing him in the lounge. 

“Kitchen”, she heard him say. She pulled off her coat and tossed it onto the leather sofa, and rounded the corner into the kitchen. Sherlock was sitting at the table, staring into a microscope. 

“What do you need?” she asked, coming closer to peer at the samples he had spread all over the table.

“I need your opinion on these soil samples.” He stood up from the chair and indicated she should sit.

oOo

An hour later, they’d made some progress in identifying the different samples. Molly stretched and stood. “Oh, I have a terrible headache. I’m sure you have some Paracetamol in the bathroom, I’ll just help myself.”

She was down the hall and into the bathroom before Sherlock could untangle his long legs from the chair he’d been sitting in “No, Molly, wait! I’ll get them for you!” He rushed down the hall to find her with her hand on the medicine cabinet door, brows furrowed, looking at him.

“What’s the matter, Sherlock? I’m perfectly capable of finding the tablets.”

She opened up the cabinet and reached in, moving her hands along the bottle and jars looking for the Paracetamol. And then her eye caught another bottle, and she realized why Sherlock didn’t want her in there. She slowly removed her hand, closed the cabinet, and turned to him.

“I’m sorry. That was a blatant disregard for your privacy. It never even occurred to me. I’m sorry. I’ll just see myself out.”

She tried to step past Sherlock, who was blocking the bathroom door. “No need, Molly. What’s done is done. So now you know that the great Sherlock Holmes has herpes.”

Molly looked up at him. “A quarter of people do, Sherlock, either oral or, um, genital. It’s a thing. I’m a doctor, I’ve seen worse. I do…”

“Don’t say it, Molly.” said Sherlock, interrupting. “It wasn’t funny the first time.”

Molly laughed. “Perhaps not. But anyway, don’t worry about it. I’m a doctor. I’ll be discreet, I’m not going to go sell it to the press, like SOME people.”

Sherlock laughed. “You do realize that 95 percent of everything Janine said was a lie, right?”

Molly shrugged. “It wasn’t all negative stuff, Sherlock. I bet lots of women were...titillated.”

“Mmm, yes. How disappointing to them if they knew the truth.” Sherlock reached around her and pulled the bottle of Valtrex out of the medicine cabinet. “John writes my prescriptions. He hadn’t been living here very long before I had an outbreak, and he noticed my discomfort. He pointed out that a regular dose of this would keep it at bay, and it has.” 

He tossed the bottle into the sink and turned and stalked back into the lounge. Molly followed him.

“Have a seat, Molly, and I’ll tell you a Junkie Sherlock story. They’re rare, so enjoy the treat.” He indicated John’s chair, across from his own, and they both sat down. 

“It starts, like so many stories of my life, with Uni. I finished, by virtue of my intelligence, against all the things I did to sabotage myself. I didn’t want to be there, but Mummy and Daddy insisted, and of course by then Mycroft was already so successfully manipulating the British government. So off I went. I was most of the way through before Mycroft showed up and dragged me off to rehab, and then deposited me back with ‘babysitters’ to make sure I stayed clean. 

“But before they got better, things got bad. Really bad. It started with cocaine, and moved on to heroin. Sweet, sweet heroin. I still dream about heroin, did you know that, Molly? I wake up and the feel of that high still strums through my body and it takes everything I’ve got to ignore it until the memories fade. I throw myself back into the Work.

“I never had trouble keeping myself supplied. I did some minor detective work for other students, it was enough to keep me in drug money. This made me popular with other students of the same persuasion. Including Olivia.”

He sighed then, closing his eyes and tilting his head back. Molly sat still as she could, not wanting to interrupt the reverie he was in. 

“Olivia was conventionally pretty, if you care about that sort of thing, which I didn’t, and still don’t. But I was twenty-one, with all the same drives and urges of most twenty-one year old boys, and she was quite willing to sate my lust. It wasn’t a trade, not specifically, but I kept her around and kept her in drugs because she was willing. It wasn’t love, or tender, just hormonal, high people chasing more pleasure. It went on for a while - six weeks, maybe?

“She’d show up, we’d fuck, we’d get high, not always in that order, and then she’d be gone again by the time I came to my senses. It was the perfect situation for me. I got what I needed, and she didn’t need anything...emotional from me. 

“Until I woke up and it felt like my groin was on fire. Not literal fire, although I suppose that might have hurt less.

“A trip to the clinic confirmed what I knew just by looking. Genital herpes. I confronted Olivia, who claimed she hadn’t had a breakout in years, and didn’t notice the one she had until after our last tumble, and then didn’t know how to bring it up. I threw her out of my room, screaming at her that she was just a useless, strung out, diseased junkie.

“It didn’t occur to me until later that that’s exactly what I was, too.

“The clinic gave me antivirals, which I took right up until rehab. There was no way I was going to tell the rehab doctors about my prescription, lest Mycroft find out. I swore off sex, blaming it for my current condition. Obviously I wasn’t going to look at my own behavior and drugs problem. It was the sex. No more sex for me.

“I never got back on meds. I finished Uni, started working with the Yard, and was in and out of rehab a few more times. I achieved some level of fame. There was no way I was going to let word get out about my condition. Until John figured out why I was tiptoeing around the flat in as little clothing as possible, obviously in pain.”

Molly had listened quietly to his story. Once he finished, he was able to lift his eyes and meet hers across the small room. “So now you know my shameful secret. I trust you’ll keep it between us.”

Molly’s face softened, and she gazed across the room at the man that she, despite everything he’d put her through, loved.

“You’re lucky it wasn’t something worse, you know that; right? If that’s the worst that you came out of that time of your life, you should consider yourself thankful. It may not be curable, but it won’t kill you, and it’s not as highly contagious as people think it is, if you’re careful.”

Sherlock looked at Molly, and looked down in his lap again. “So, I guess that explains everything else, too.”

Molly looked around in confusion. “What else?”

“Why I rebuffed your attention. Why I pretended not to know you were interested. Why I never acted on my own interest.” He looked at her confused. Wasn’t it obvious?

“Your...your interest?” she said, watching the detective. “What interest?”

“I told you you were the person who mattered the most, Molly. But you had Tom, and then you told me that you and Tom were having a lot of sex.”

He stared at her, willing her to understand, and then began speaking quickly. “I ignored your interest at first because I knew no one would want to sleep with me again anyway. And then you were having a lot of sex with Tom, so clearly sex is important to you. Yet I have this STI that is contagious and I knew you’d never want to have sex with me, and your obvious interest in sex meant that I was an unsuitable partner for you. So to save us all an uncomfortable conversation, I just ignored it.”

He stopped talking, and looked at her. “Although here we are.”

Molly stood, and walked over to his chair. She stood next to him, ruffling his curls and looking down at him. “Sherlock, LOTS of people with HSV have full, healthy sex lives. You’re on meds, and there are condoms, and you should know by now the symptoms of an breakout starting, and while sex with condoms isn’t the greatest thing ever, it isn’t the worst, either. You mean all this time you were interested but you were afraid to tell me? I’m a doctor, Sherlock. I cut up dead bodies for a living, did you really think this was something I couldn’t deal with?”

Sherlock reached up and took her hand out of his hair, holding it. “But it’s so shameful, and awful, and the way I got it...I was trading drugs for sex, Molly.”

“You are an addict, and when you were using you did things that I find repellent. This is true. That’s why I was so upset when you were using again, Sherlock. Because it turns you into someone else, it turns you into someone that isn’t the man I… love.”

Molly stopped talking then, and stared into Sherlock’s eyes, willing him to believe that she was willing to work around this if that was all that was keeping them apart. 

Sherlock stared up at her, and finally stood, pulling her to him and wrapping his arms around her waist. “You really mean that, don’t you?”

“Of course I do, you git,” she said, laughing. “You’re telling me that you are attracted to and care about me, and the only thing stopping us is you were afraid I wouldn’t be willing to make the effort to not catch HSV from you? It’s the best news I’ve heard all day.”

Molly stretched up on her tiptoes and planted a chaste kiss on Sherlock’s lips. “I love you. All of you. ALL of your flaws. So there’s one more. Throw it in the pile and let’s get to work.”

Sherlock grinned then, and leaned down and captured her lips in a kiss that was most assuredly NOT chaste.


End file.
